I finished
Starfield.
I'll jump to the headline before expounding: it's
. It's fine. Usually when people say "fine" they kinda mean "bad." But it's not bad, it's genuinely fine. But fine in a weird way, which is to say it's not as if everything's between okay and good, it's more that some things are great and some things are very bad, which is a harder thing to net out than something which is just pretty good the whole way through.
The great: The starship design, while logistically finnicky at times, is pretty great. You build a ship and then it's just there, right in front of you, and you can walk around in it. A simple thing, but pretty remarkable to actually experience. Add cargo capacity and your ship handles worse and you can't jump through space as far. Simple cause and effect that lends a feeling of reality to the whole remarkable thing.
Also, the lore is very good, the voice acting is great, and this is probably the best character work they've ever done. Not sure it's even close, in fact.
The good: The visuals are a clear step up. The gunplay is fun and satisfying and there are lots of wrinkles to it which I won't spoil. The story is interesting, surprising, and the way it ties into the game itself, as a game, is also clever and fun. It successfully evokes a sense of scale and wonder.
The okay: if you crave more of The Bethesda Game, you'll mostly get your fix here. Lots of little characters tucked away in side quests, of which there are many. A handful are extremely good, a lot of others are cookie cutter, but you knew that going in. That's what you're signing up for. If you thought you wouldn't get that fix, don't worry, you do. If you thought they might break out and improve on that formula, sorry, they didn't.
The bad: One of the things about Bethesda's open world RPGs--and it's nearly reached the level of meme--is the way you'll head off towards a quest marker and get waylaid by 20 things along the way and forget what you were doing. It's great, that sense of fullness you get from moving around the world.
That is almost completely gone here.
Why? Because you don't actually go from one place to another. You almost always "jump" there in your ship. You fast travel to a planet, you fast travel between locations on planets. You almost never just walk from one place to another place and find things on the way. This is such a clear misstep it's hard to imagine they could let it happen. My best guess as to how it happened is that it might be
unavoidable in a space game, at least for now, and they just really wanted to make a space game anyway. But the only way to keep this aspect of things is to actually have you travel between star systems in real time, and I imagine that's really hard to make fun and interesting. And it's harder to have things "along the way" in that context than it is on land. You'll get random encounters in the orbits of planets when you arrive but they're few and far between and usually just tiny interactions. Some are very fun or funny or sweet, but they're a tiny, tiny part of the game.
The same is true on the surface. Huge planets populated by the same dozen or so layouts. I'm kind of shocked at it, really. I know it's a lot of work to create different cave systems and habs and stuff, and these are the kinds of games you play long enough that you're definitely going to run into dupes...but I still ran into them earlier and more often than I would have guessed.
The only exception are the four big handcrafted cities, which are really well designed and interesting and "full." But the people you run into
within them are the only approximation of the thing I'm talking about, and even there they're not the same. Even there they're basically just shops along a route, as opposed to people or events you feel like you've run into by happenstance.
To be charitable, this was a big lift for them. There's a lot of new tech stuff, and just launching a new IP like this at this scale, with a new engine, is probably incredibly hard. It's easy to imagine a sequel (in like eight years, I guess) iterating on this very effectively, but they really painted themselves into a corner with this one with the choice of theming and all the new things they wanted to try to do. I admire it on some level, but the result is very mixed.
I'm glad it exists, I enjoyed playing it. And I have every confidence the modding is going to make this more interesting and worth replaying in the next year or so, even. But it's not a great game. It's a moderately good one.
Also, a clear victory now to
The Outer Worlds, which came out a few years ago and drew comparisons to this right away. It's inferior in so many ways, but it had a much greater sense of what it wanted to be, and what it could pull off. It feels very restricted, there's no sense of "open space" in it at all...but as a result they jam-packed it with lots of great quests. It feels much smaller, but also more alive at times. In retrospect they prioritized the right thing.
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